DESCRIPTION (provided by investigator): Females under 18 have become the fastest-growing segment of the juvenile justice population, with their arrests accounting for 27 percent of total arrests during 1999. Regardless of offense type, studies show that from 60 percent to 87 percent of adolescent female offenders need substance abuse treatment (Prescott, 1998). These juvenile justice statistics, as well as a growing body of research evidence suggest high levels of comorbidity between substance use and delinquency in adolescent females. In addition to continued delinquency and substance use problems, additional short- and long-term outcomes include health-risking sexual behavior, mental health disorders, early pregnancy, school dropout, welfare dependence, and mortality. Despite the documented need, effective interventions targeting multiple outcomes for these high-risk females have not been reported in the literature. We propose to conduct a randomized intervention with 100 females, ages 12-16, referred from the juvenile justice system who are in need of out-of-home placement because of serious delinquency. Half will be placed in Treatment Foster Care (TFC), where one girl is placed in a family home with foster parents who have been recruited, trained, and are supervised to provide a set of treatment components hypothesized to be related to our specific short- and long-term outcomes. The other half will be placed in Group Care (GC), where girls typically live with 6-15 peers experiencing similar problems with delinquency. Multi-method, multi-agent measures will be collected to form indicators and constructs of the intervention components and outcomes. We focus on the following overall aims: 1) to develop and implement an individualized multi-component intervention model for girls referred by juvenile justice who have multiple arrests and high levels of co-occurring problems with substance use, and participation in health-risking sexual behaviors; 2) to examine the effects of the intervention on a set of short-term (proximal) outcomes at two points during the intervention; 3) to examine the mediating effects of the proximal outcomes on more distal outcomes at 12 months post-intervention and in semi-annual follow-ups. It is hypothesized that proximal outcomes will predict distal outcomes, regardless of group assignment (i.e., TFC or GC).